Overview: Tim Parsons gives us a look at some of the implications of the ‘everyone is a designer’ thinking that is becoming more and more popular.

Thoughts: I can see some validity to his position.  He is coming from the perspective of a professional designer. The skill set and training that this group brings to a design project is vital.  However, when it comes to designing things or products – to say that the end user should be ignored is a bit short sighted.  Many product designers have gone through the soul killing process of creating a beautiful work, only to have it changed over and over again until it can be produced for the masses.  Why not talk with those you are designing for from the beginning and bring beauty to a collaborative process.  Very few designers have the luxury of behaving like highly paid artists. Most have to live in the practical world of making a living.

Original Post and Comments HERE at BlueprintMagazine.com

The Myths of User-Centred Design

Tim Parsons

The extent to which members of the public not trained in design should be involved in the design process has become something of a hot topic over the past few years. Before the emergence of user-centred design, except for consulting market research reports or focus groups, designers were largely left alone to channel their predictions of the public’s desires and behaviour into their creations. Today in many areas of design and architecture, seeking the opinions of the public, and even designing with them, is now considered good practice. Global design consultancies such as IDEO expound the virtues of the designer acting as a facilitator, working in teams with non-designer stakeholders. Co-design has become a business model, both for companies selling research insights and as a means of enabling the public to have a more direct impact upon the look of the products they buy.

The notion that ‘everyone is a designer’ is being heard with ever-greater frequency. It is the essence of the RSA’s new Design and Society agenda, launched recently with the mantra: ‘you knowmore than you think you do’. Its author, design director Emily Campbell, describes the profession of design as ‘common resourcefulness refined by a technical education,’ and believes that ‘design can re-awaken citizens’ own resourcefulness’. The programme of projects aims to transfer knowledge, currently the preserve of designers, to the public, on the understanding that it will give them the tools to become better citizens.

In parts, Design and Society is reminiscent of sentiments expressed in Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver’s 1973 book Adhocism– The Case for Improvisation, which, with a hint of anarchy, states ‘a new mode of direct action is emerging…where everyone can create their own environment out of impersonal subsystems. [Adhocism] cuts through the usual delays caused by specialization, bureaucracy and hierarchical organisation.’

Important though these developments are, one wonders where this leaves the professional designer working at the sharp end of defining the final outcome of our products and buildings. With the public encouraged to become designers, and designers encouraged to become politically active managers, the flair and talent for creating the physical, which has been the traditional currency of the designer, appears to be losing its shine.

The furore over Hilary Cottam, a previous Design Council director, winning the 2005Designer of the Year award (akin, as furniture designer Jane Dillon put it, to ‘giving the gold medal to the coach’) revealed that plenty of designers were stung by the encroachment of management upon territory conventionally reserved for celebrating the craft of the profession. In the cacophony of accusations, the form-givers missed an opportunity to eloquently state what their work brings to the public.

Regardless of the worthiness of a project, there is social and cultural value in having it physically shaped – ‘designed’ in the traditional meaning of the word – by someone able to make intuitive decisions about the power of forms, who has sensitivity towards materials and can bring about a result that has an immediate resonance with the viewer that comes before rational interpretation i.e. to create beauty. These are not skills found in everyone, and some cannot be taught.

With the upcoming launch of a company whose online software allows customers to ‘drive’ rapid manufacturing technology without any specialist training, enabling them to order products they have ‘designed’ themselves, professional form-givers may sense an attack from another flank. Digital Forming is a consortium of four partners who have developed a platform for themass-customisation of ‘lifestyle products’. Demonstrated recently at the Science Museum, the experience promises far more than it delivers. People choose a product (a pen, a lamp, a lemon squeezer or a pair of sunglasses), which is presented on-screen as a 3Dmodel along with a handful of sliders. Moving each slider changes a pre-set parameter and morphs the model, making it more faceted, smoother, lumpier and so on. The customer can then order their creation to be rapid-manufactured (a lusciousmisnomer in this context, being as it is, extremely time-consuming when compared to serial production processes) and posted to them.

The noble cause of providing people with objects they have a personal attachment with has been diminished by the restrictions placed on the user. In the name of ensuring they cannot modify the object so as to render it ‘useless’ the extent to which they can ‘design’ it is limited. It has already been designed. The user is simply choosing from among the many possible combinations of slider positions dictated by the team.

The aim of tooling up the layman should be to enable them to come up with ideas that challenge the conventional wisdom of the professional. The results may not be pretty to the trained eye and may be inappropriate in many contexts, but naivety has the potential to overturn blind convention to reveal the sublime. A system that limits the layman’s options to those pre-conceived by the professional renders itself impotent, not to say boring.

There has been much hype about the future of home 3D printing, but it no more makes product designers out of us all than sewing machines made us fashion designers, logging made us journalists or desk-top publishing made us graphic designers. If those examples are anything to go by it will actually increase the awareness among amateurs of the skills of the professional.

So designers need not feel threatened by the tooling up of the layman, either with design thinking or access to new ways of making. Both should be welcomed. But in the excitement we should recognize that there is still a place for the professional designer, both at the board room table and at the drawing board. Doing so will help us not to lose sight of what constitutes quality in the tangible outcomes of this evermore nebulous process we call design.

Tim Parsons 3D Design at Camberwell College of Arts and his book Thinking: Objects –Contemporary Approaches to Product Design, has recently been published by AVA Academia

It is always great to see the efforts of groups that are integrating Design Thinking into mainstream life. From the official press release:

The summit to be held on June 23, 2011 is being hosted by the Design Council in partnership with the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and sponsored by Jaguar Land Rover. It is also being supported by Wired UK and the Gatsby Foundation.

150 leaders and influential thinkers from the worlds of design, business, public services and academia will attend to engage in the debate. Hundreds more are expected to join a webcast of the open sessions (via the special pages on the Design Council website, www.designcouncil.org.uk/summit11). These sessions tackle key issues for design and economic growth, including ‘Manufacturing: valuing design and innovation?’, ‘The built environment: foundations for growth?’ and ‘Procurement:  government as a design leader?’

I appreciate David Sharp at the Design Council UK for the “heads up” on this event.  I will not be able to attend in person, but plan to join via webcast.  Looking forward to some really good things coming out of this summit.

Just had a very insightful meeting with Jeneanne Rae.  Jeneanne has been in the Design Thinking field since before it was called Design Thinking.  She was hired by David Kelley at IDEO to help grow the business integration part of that company as an MBA and a significant part of the growth into the company that they are today.  Since leaving IDEO, she has been working as a consultant to fortune 500 companies in the area of Service Design.

She regularly speaks at conferences and is an ongoing contributor to BusinessWeek.  She drinks dark roast coffee with both cream and sugar.

The majority of our time was focused on the best practices to involve End Users in the Service Design process.  One of the hallmarks of Design Thinking is breaking away from the “stakeholders only” mentality where insiders decide what they believe is needed, and then create and roll out the service or product. To be truly effective, the process must include regular involvement and feedback from those who will actually use the services (Users).

There are 3 key times for End Users to be involved:

1. When you are doing your initial research into the “problem” that you are solving (your service proposition)
2. When you are prototyping your services – BEFORE you implement
3. Immediately after implementation – to make sure that you are actually solving the problem.

Let’s go deeper into each of those.

1. When you are researching.  There are two segments of research. One is hard data collection (demographics, market analysis, etc) and the other is live data. This is the data you collect when you send people out into the field to watch real End Users as they interact with the elements of your service proposition.  For example- if you are working on a concept that involves online banking, you would sit with them as they use whatever online banking system they already have. You would also spend time watching people who do not use online banking and see where their pressure points and pleasure points emerge.  In addition, you would also take the time to ask questions about their experience and learn why they made the choices they did.  You may discover (as one insurance company has advertised) that sometimes they want to speak to a real person, other times they don’t.

2. When you are prototyping. Remember that there are countless opportunities to come up with the wrong solution during this entire process.  One of those wrong ways is by providing a solution that is unattainable or undesirable for Users.  It could be the “feature creep” syndrome that plagues many tech products.  The User says “I just want to be able to turn the TV on and off, change the volume and the channels.  Why do I need 100 tiny buttons on my remote?”  The tech guy responds “Let me show you. We have given you the ability to connect to and navigate your Blu Ray player, your home media server, and your Netflix/online accounts, we have integrated social media so you and your friends or followers can share favorite movies and or online content, AS WELL AS the ability to control the sound settings for your room based upon the media source AND the number of people currently in the room.  Isn’t that awesome!?”  User – “But I can’t find the power button.”

The service industry has done the same thing.  Think Voice Mail Directory

3. When you are evaluating. After so much time and energy has been put into a project, it is easy to loose sight of the actual goal. Many companies get excited about the “Launch Date” of a product or service, and mark that on the calendar as the end of the project.  DON’T DO THAT! Send your people back out into the field and watch End Users interact with your service to make sure it is doing what you intended.

Another side benefit is that you may discover they have found additional ways to use your service other than what you intended.  This has the potential to open up new markets and services for your company.  Twitter started as a quick SMS for coworkers to tell each other what they were doing – “eating pizza, reading the DesignThinkingBlog, and thinking we need to hire this guy“, but became an integral part of the international news gathering platforms.  I promise you, they did not see that one in product planning.

As Jeneanne points out, always take at least two people into the field.  That way one can watch, wonder and ask questions while the other takes pictures, video and notes.

Involving the End Users can take more time, can involve more work and may make the process more complex.  Not involving them can make it fail.

Overview of this Article: This is a post covering the rise of demand and need for Designers – but describes “T’ shaped Designers – often also called “Design Thinkers”.

Thoughts on this Article: I like seeing the beginning of this wave – and hope that it continues.  The elements of Design Thinking and the skills of a Design Thinker have the potential to revolutionize many new start ups.  This should be fun to follow.

Original Article and comments HERE at TechCrunch

Earlier this week 500 Startups announced the creation of The d.fund, a designer-centric fund with the aim of increasing the number of startups co-founded by people who have design experience. As quite a few startups like Tumblr, YouTube, Android and Flickr have achieved success because of their designer founders, d.fund founder and 500 Startups designer Enrique Allen wants to foster a community that replicates their success.

Design is valued more right now than it ever has been, hence the Quora question “Why is there such a stunningly short supply of designers in Silicon Valley right now?” Indeed, Allen tells me that the new fund has one goal, “How do we address this problem that everyone and their momma wants a designer, and there’s none to be had?”

Well The d.fund’s solution is to ask 50 or so rockstar mentors in the field, like YouTube’s Christina Brodbeck, Facebook’s Ben Blumenfeld and Google’s Chris Messina to become mentors and/or contribute a minimum of 50K to the pool. When the fund hits 50 investors, it can then fund 50 design centered startups in return.

When asked whether the fund was looking specifically for a UX, UI, or just plain graphic designer founders, Allen told me he was looking for “T-shaped people” a.k.a people with in-depth experience in one area but a broad outlook and a wide range of experiences.

“It’s going to take a different breed, a new generation of designers that not only have visual ability, interaction ability, information architecture and everything from user research and discovery to design ethnography to really foster consumer innovation,” Allen said.

Word.

More in the interview, above.

Recently, there has been a flurry of activity around some new terms, Design thinking and Design leadership. I think they are interesting terms, and describe some new directions for design. Design thinking, suggests to me, that designers have a different way of thinking – visual, abductive etc, which means that they have relevance outside of the product sphere (meaning also services).

Design leadership means two things to me. One is to achieve a leading position in the market through the strategic use of design (Apple comes to mind here… again). The second is to use design thinking in your role as a leader – that is – using design qualities in your leadership role. These are both exciting terms and a useful development from the design management term that has been around for quite some time.

A couple of things have got me to write about this. Firstly, that energetic design thinker, Monica Hestad from Plan (link)  sent me a link to a short review of books about design thinking, titled “A Design Thinker’s Reading List” (link). This just shows, how much people have been thinking about, well, design thinking.

The second thing is  a series of discussions with my good friend and bright colleague, Judith Gloppen at AHO (link). She has introduced the term Service Design Leadership as part of her PhD in the AT-ONE project.  She is researching these  relatively new terms, and trying to untangle their definitions, histories and trajectories. But, more importantly, she is looking to see if these terms should have slightly (or very) different content when used within the world of services. We recognise that services are different from products, so then, is Service-design thinking different to design thinking? Is Service Design leadership different to Design leadership.

Judith has some nice thoughts about this, which she will be sharing with us at the First Nordic Service Design Conference at AHO in November (link). At the conference, we have put together a session that highlights these terms, and one other relatively new one – service-dominant logic. To me, a discussion of terms like these makes the conference really valuable. Not because I’m a pedantic academic (ok, maybe I am one of those too) but because I really think we are beginning to uncover some of the central elements that makes design different, and valuable in today’s innovation landscape. And that’s exciting.

Overview of Article: There is a distinct skill called “Design” that is getting lost in all of the focus on Design Thinking.  As schools try to create multiple options for students, they are getting away from actually training the classical Designer.

Thoughts on this Article: I like Gadi and his insights. He is a hand’s on, real world designer that understands the demands that come with clients who expect quality.  This article reminds all of us that the whole Design Thinking movement is not simply the progression of Design, but rather the cousin of Design (I would say the brother of Design is the CAD). It is important that we do not diminish classical Design as we engage the growing world of Design Thinking, and that our schools find a clear way to distinguish between the nuances that are emerging.

Original article and discussion HERE at FASTCOMPANY.COM

American Design Schools Are a Mess, and Produce Weak Graduates

As head of a major Silicon Valley industrial design studio, I review hundreds or even thousands of portfolios every year. It is an essential part of my job as I look for the best people to join our growing team. Because the right mix of talent is so crucial to our success, I make it a principle to review every portfolio sent to us myself.

That commitment puts me in a bit of a tight spot, as I struggle to find the right way to say the right things to people whose high hopes I’m forced to dash. Despite the recent surge in interest in design careers, the quality of candidates’ portfolios seems to have stagnated or even diminished.

The problem has become increasingly acute. I’m eager to hire the next great class of designers, but to my dismay–and the dismay of many young hopefuls who’ve often spent many years and thousands of dollars preparing to enter the industry–I’m finding that the impressive academic credentials of most students don’t add up to the basic skills I require in a junior designer.

The quality of recent grads has stagnated or even diminished

Simply put, the design education system today is failing many aspiring young students. Some of the design schools they’ve attended have no real design process education, while others have only process education. Many come from engineering programs that claim to be “design” programs. Lots have been taught some version of “design thinking,” but most of that is devoid of any cultural, aesthetic, or form intelligence. Most students can claim some familiarity with design research but few have any sense of design integration.

Academic design programs are crippled by blurry standards which are so vastly different from program to program that it is nearly impossible for me, as an employer, to have a reliable idea of what skills a student toting a design degree can be expected to possess.

Overall, the schools’ results are often a muddled mess, the end result of programs pulling in every direction, with no sense of focused common ground, no basic core curriculum in design.

Mind you: I’m no academic snob. I don’t care which school an applicant attended or who his or her professor was. Employers like me and my peers need evidence that a new hire has what it takes to hit the ground running. And, given the lack of consistency in design school training, we’re forced to put more weight on portfolio reviews or evidence of skills learned through internships than academic credentials.

One way schools could change that is by adopting a clear, “consumer friendly” approach that spells out to young designers-to-be that, for example, “With this degree you’d be better positioned to approach an in-house design team in a large corporation or a very technical product development agency.” Conversely, they should state explicitly that other degrees “are not suitable for design-agency work.”

The schools are a muddled mess, the end result of programs pulling in every direction

I know how critical the right program is personally and economically for the students (and their parents!). I think academia must develop clarity quickly. Celebrating the one-in-a-thousand alumnus who made it big is not helpful and propagates the misleading idea that a hodgepodge of courses builds a skill set that would be universally useful in the marketplace.

Much of the work that students show me in their portfolios is broken into two categories: skills work (3D CAD) and process work (research, model-making). Only a few show projects showcasing the applicant’s ability to integrate seamlessly all levels of creativity. Such well integrated notion of design is shared by a few good programs: In the U.S., Cincinnati has an excellent program with very solid graduates, while In Europe, many German and some UK schools are developing an excellent sense of cohesion in their grads.

But most portfolios I see lack the critical mass associated with a solid inside-out, outside-in, perception of design rather than simply skills training. Anecdotally, the one skill that does “glue” design together, hand sketching, is slowly eroding. Mainly seen as a quick ideation phase before CAD, this skill should be seen as a way of thinking–combining visual thinking with personal aesthetics. Good internship programs are essential to this “gluing” process. There is nothing more effective to this amalgamation process than those moments in the real world of design, when an idea clicks to become a product.

Unfortunately, the problems don’t end with undergraduate design education. The American notion of a design master’s degree as being any BA plus some design added on top is even worse. While many masters programs are essentially four-year basic design programs with loftier credentials, some programs simply combine an assortment of academic credits with some light design glue to create a hollowed degree with very little in the center.

Students lately seem to have a sense of entitlement that has no place in reality

I recall a long conversation with a candidate from a very respectable program that provided next-to-no aesthetic education. Her expensive degree had given her very little to offer in an area she felt central to her personal ambition, creating beautiful objects of cultural importance. The road she taken was not unusual: Her Language Arts BA combined with excellent scores in relevant tests made her an excellent candidate for a demanding MA program. But it didn’t make her a designer. This approach works only in America. Asian and European schools (I get many of these portfolios as well) will demand substantial design education before allowing a BA student to pursue an MA in design. In other words, it is too easy in America to start with non-design BA and switch to MA in design. Any school that allows that should clearly present it as a “high risk” career path. Not doing so has moral and intellectual drawbacks.

Lastly–and please remember that my role in the studio is primarily boss, not teacher–students lately seem to have a sense of entitlement that has no place in reality. Design is, in many ways, a tougher profession than, say, law or medicine since it has far fewer opportunities, lower pay, and a far murkier career path. Young designers tend to approach their first jobs as “extended education” with me, the principal, assigned to promote their career, rather than deliver projects to clients. Try telling that to the people who are paying for our services!

The first five years in a designer’s career are absolutely critical and the true educational experience. A young designer must appreciate that opportunity to mature while on the job and take nothing for granted. A willingness to do anything and everything he or she can to get experience and learn, from the ground up, should be reinforced by the schools. Since design can be a difficult career option, we’ve got to instill young designers with a critical sense of reality — your first job is your true MA, your best chance to establish a career path, your opportunity to work on the coolest projects — and you get paid for it. What a great job it is!

[Images by Betahaus -- which it should be pointed out is a pretty great model of DIY design education]

Overview: This addresses the ongoing conversation about the term “Design Thinking”

Thoughts: In all honesty, it really doesn’t matter, does it?  If people get the concept, and are able to be more effective in their processes, then who cares what it is called?  I do think the links in this post are worth following .

Original Post HERE at Peter Merholz site

I have a… complicated relationship with the phrase “design thinking”. Over 4 years ago, I wrote a post, “The Dark Side of Design Thinking” that looked at the shortcomings of the designer’s perspective, and even earlier, lamented how the phrase “design thinking” was being used to mean “thinking that I like,” and not really about design.

But then I also co-wrote a book that addresses the value of design approaches (and I’ve been known, in person, to say that it’s a book about “design thinking” that never uses the phrase “design thinking”).

I most recently blogged on Harvard Business about “Why Design Thinking Won’t Save You”, because I find myself, again, fed up with how people use this phrase in such a way that it’s essentially meaningless, and it seems to serve little more than helping sell design firms trying to be more strategic, or sell business magazines in desperate need of appearing hip.

The problem I faced in that post is that there’s no good alternative term for the kind of thinking I promote, which is a wildly multi-disciplinary approach. Dev tried with “hybrid thinking”, but I found that phrase too limiting. I considered “integrated thinking,” but it’s too vague, and too similar to Roger Martin’s integrative thinking. Perhaps the best term I found was “post-disciplinary,” ironically enough from IDEO’s Jane Fulton Suri (ironic because the rise of the phrase “design thinking” is pretty much all due to IDEO).

Something I don’t address in my post, but where I think there’s a real opportunity for exploration, is to identify how this wildly multi-disciplinary thinking actually does contribute to organizational success in the 21st century.

Overview of Site: This is just as it says..

Thoughts on this Site: Great Idea.  And some really good creative leadership thoughts that are presented.

Thoughts on this site:

http://thirtyconversationsondesign.com/

Overview of Article: This is a look at Open Design City, how it came into being, and what the implications might be if this concept emerges as a solid trend.

Thoughts on this Article: OK – this is just marginally related to Design Thinking, but I thought it was worth making it available.  The underlying concept here is getting the end users involved in the actual creation and production process.  In a sense, it is taking Design Thinking and giving the end  users the actual tools to make what they think would work.

While that may sound fun – and probably would be a lot of fun to do – there are problems.  There is a reason that the DT process includes a collaborative process of varied perspectives.  It keeps the product or service from becoming self serving or ineffective.  Having the end user as the designer/creator/user would seem to be a very limiting perspective.

Original Article and comments HERE at FastCompany

A Peek at the Future of DIY: Open-source Workshops

DIY reigns in the virtual world. With so many old points of friction removed, we can freely and cheaply build our own blogs, e-books, and Web magazines. But making real, live stuff still seems like a slog reserved for those who know their way around a bandsaw.

Not anymore. The open-source revolution is putting product design in the hands of regular Joes. Take Berlin-based Open Design City (ODC). It’s a workshop in which anyone can learn to make just about anything, whether a bioplastic wallet (above) or a lamp made out of sweaters (up top). The recipe is simple: Gather people willing to share ideas and collaborate. Teach them to use a few power-tools. Then make things — cool things, not junk even your mother’d be too embarrassed to display.

It’s a movement that has the potential to upend traditional modes of industrial design and manufacturing — and even change how we consume products. “I strongly believe we’ll see more spaces emerging like this,” says Christoph Fahle, of Open Design City. “It’s not so much about scientific development, because this work doesn’t require rocket science. It’s more about creating the social interactions that invent new things. If you look at Facebook, it wasn’t just its technology that changed society; rather it was the social idea.”

Open workshops are in many ways a natural outgrowth of DIY fever. Resources abound from sites like MAKE, Instructables.com, and IKEAhacker; and sales-networks like Etsy and Supermarket. You’ve got the modes of production, too: People can now purchase their own 3-D printers for less than $1,000.

Co-founder Jay Cousins stumbled into Open Design City through a circuitous path. A trained product designer specializing in what he calls “crockery” (in a delightful British accent), Cousins became disillusioned. “The job became a trap –- it was all about management, instead of creativity,” he recalls. “That got me thinking about where designers and inventors fit into this production model.”

In search of fresh inspiration, Cousins moved to Berlin in 2009 and stumbled into Palomar 5, a temporary shared live-work space for creative types, then in its infancy. (Despite its hippy-dippy-sounding conceit, the endeavor is actually sponsored by Deutsche Telekom.)

At Palomar 5 “we observed a lot of how we behave in these collaborative roles,” Cousins says. “You enter into this intense awareness of what’s assisting your creative energy and what’s blocking it.”

There he met Christopher Doering, a product designer trained at Bauhaus University in Weimar. Emerging from six weeks at Palomar 5, both were seized by the dream of creating an open workshop of their own.

So in the spring of this year, Cousins and Doering ran a DIY workshop at betahaus, a new co-working space in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, while simultaneously preparing a live open-workshop event for Berlin’s annual design conference, DMY. At the same time, they were scrambling to find space for the tools Deutsche Telekom fortuitously donated to them after Palomar 5. Betahaus’s empty garage proved the perfect spot, and Open Design City was born.

Open Design City has a built-in constituency of potential members: betahaus workers upstairs can wander downstairs and rent gear by the hour or day, or participate in an open workshop in which a leader teaches the group a particular skill, then opens the floor to experimentation.

The equipment available to them is vast. They can futz around with woodworking tools (saws, jigsaws, hammers); a silk-screener for textiles; photography equipment; hot plates and a sink; wool, soap and bubble-wrap to make felt; a generous supply of starch, vinegar and glycerin that, when mixed with water and heated, make moldable starch-plastic.

A few tools are higher tech: a 3-D printer, which “prints” by squeezing out thin layers of a given material to build a product’s shape, using three dimensions’ of data the user inputs. A platforming machine resembles an oven: a thin layer of nylon is heated until it softens, then pushed over a mold to create a shape as it hardens again. Open Design City doesn’t have CNC cutters and some of the other tools necessary to qualify as an official “fablab” — which might have something to do with the fact that much of the equipment and materials are donated. “One guy just bought a ton of white Lego bricks and donated some,” Fahle says.

Learning to handle the equipment is usually the toughest part. Doering recalls the experience of one ODC member, an Iranian-born PR manager working at betahaus. She wanted to make huge Styrofoam letters to spell slogans at an event supporting the Iranian election resistance (see below). After pricing the job at a traditional prototyping workshop — “incredibly expensive,” says Doering — she came to ODC thinking she could explain her project, then hand off the work to more capable hands. Not so.

“We made a deal: she would buy us a machine to cut Styrofoam, and I would teach her [and her friends] how to use it,” says Doering. “At the very beginning, she kept repeating: This is impossible. How can I do this? But then we spent 15 minutes together, she saw how it’s actually fun and easy to make, and she and her friends totally enjoyed it. They spent a week cutting like crazy, building a jailhouse out of bricks, inventing a method to join the letters. All that was needed was this little start.”

Open Design City encourages a “parallel process” of work to do away with egos and promote a sense of play. Cousins explains, “If I believe a project should be done one way, and Chris has a different idea, instead of arguing over which way is best, we try both ideas at once and share what we learn as we go.”

Does skill or experience matter in this brave new world? Yes and no. Doering likes how open workshops like Open Design City throw into question the whole idea of quality (incidentally, the topic of his final thesis at Bauhaus).

“Quality is defined by to what degree certain requirements are fulfilled, obviously,”

he explains. “Industrial culture says: here’s a product with a certain use or value. But products don’t work that way; things can be used in so many ways. You cannot say: this is a lamp; its purpose is to fill a space with light. That’s totally limiting. It’s also a gift from your grandma; it’s a personalizing touch in your living room; it’s landfill; it’s made of materials that cost something. You have to have an element of flexibility [in your thinking].” He picks up a layer of starch plastic on a worktable and brandishes it. “This is a bio-polymer. It’s not water-resistant, and I don’t know how long it’ll last –- a year, maybe. This is the point about oil-based plastics: they last forever, and that’s not a good thing. We don’t love our products that long.” Upcycling events –- in which old products get broken down for parts and recombined into new, desirable things again –- are an ODC standby.

All this sounds studiously anti-corporate – and to some extent it is. But as product designer and pioneer of the Open Design movement Ronen Kadushin says, toppling the corporate power structure isn’t the goal. “You know the old Roman proverb about your grandfather’s ax?” he says. “My father changed its handle; I changed the blade. Nothing of the ax I hold is from my grandpa, but it’s still his — it’s a tradition of values. We don’t have objects to fulfill this need anymore; we don’t have the ax. The best way to get attached to a product or object is to make it yourself.”

Where could a future of open product-making lead? To a silicon-fueled Middle Ages, say Doering, Fahle and Cousins, where craftsmen connect “locally” across the globe via the Internet. “The future vision [of this] is kind of regressive, really,” Cousins admits.

“It takes you back to the baker, the furniture maker, the electronics specialist, your tinkerer –- a distributive system in which we recognize each other’s values, and value. We can hardly take an object anymore and say: this is 100 percent ethical; nobody was hurt, no community was decimated in making this object, because it’s so complicated and far-removed from us. We’re sustained right now by this big system that’s more fragile than we might like to believe. Distributing this knowledge [of how to make products] within the community gives us resilience, lets us fend for ourselves better.”

“But it’s not just about survival,” Cousins continues. “It’s about the emotional cost this disconnect exacts from us. We’re struggling to reconnect with a community, a culture of participation. That’s a very strong bond that we’ve been missing more and more over the last 100 years.” It’s an intriguing Mobius-strip vision of the next decade: the detritus of an industrial revolution becomes raw material for medieval-style workshops, a movement made possible by the crowd-sourced Internet, a populace tired of living virtually, and machinery democratized in price by a consumer base eager to buy the new means of production. What’s old is, indeed, new again.

Jude Stewart writes about design and culture for Slate, The Believer, Fast Company, and GOOD. She also blogs about color for PRINT. Her book about color’s many intersections with culture is forthcoming from Bloomsbury USA. Follow her tweets at twitter.com/joodstew.

[Images via Open Design City on Flickr]